Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?: A Thoroughly Southern Mystery

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “Olive?” Ridd asked.

  She sighed. “I’ll pass this year. Like I’ve been telling Mac, the furniture store sent me the wrong couch and I’ve been on the phone all week trying to get the decorator who is supposed to paint my apartment, so I know when he’s coming and what color paint to buy. And now Edie told me on the way down here that our vacation schedules were posted yesterday, and I only get two days off at Christmas.” She raised her hands in surrender. “Too many things are going wrong right now for me to try and think of things to be thankful for.”

  That certainly let the yeast out of everybody’s rolls.

  “Why don’t we go let our dinner settle, then come back for dessert?” Martha suggested.

  We all helped carry food and dishes to the kitchen. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw Smitty carrying in a stack of Martha’s china with a glass balanced on top. Tyrone brought up the rear with six more glasses, but they both looked more expert at carrying dishes than I would have expected. They must have been eating at Martha’s a lot lately.

  “Hey,” I greeted them. “What you all been up to?”

  I expected “Nuthin’ much,” but Tyrone’s big face lit up. “We’re taking sword fighting. What’s it called again, Smitty?”

  “Kenjutsu.” To hear that word roll off Smitty’s tongue, you’d have thought he’d been speaking Japanese all his life.

  “We’re having our first demonstration next Saturday afternoon. Not this one, but the next one,” Tyrone added, in case I didn’t remember the difference between “this Saturday” and “next Saturday.” “Could you come? We’re gettin’ pretty good.”

  The thought of somebody turning Tyrone and Smitty loose with swords froze my gizzard, but I nodded. If somebody got killed, I could be a reliable witness. If I weren’t the corpse.

  “Now, you and Edie get out of here,” Martha told me. “We’ve got plenty of help.”

  I could tell Edie was of two minds about whether to stay or go, but I’ve never needed more than one invitation to leave a kitchen. I suggested we take a walk.

  We ambled along without talking, enjoying the warm autumn sunshine and content to leave the conversation to a forest full of birds settling in for winter. Behind us we could hear my three youngest grandchildren calling and laughing as they flung a Frisbee.

  “Kids are so sweet,” Edie said wistfully. “Do you ever wish they’d never grow up?”

  “Heavens, no.” But something in her tone made me ask, “Is it Valerie giving you trouble, or Genna?”

  She rubbed her mouth with one hand, as if wiping away something sour. “Both. Genna said you gave Ridd and Martha your house.”

  I swatted away a late fly. “Sort of. We swapped with them, then used the money from the sale of their house to help buy the one we’re living in. It’s been a tradition since the house was built to give it and the five acres around it to the oldest child. Walker will get an equivalent amount from our estate—if I haven’t spent it all first.”

  “But what about your old age? How do you know there’ll be enough? I mean, people live so long now, and health costs are going up so fast.” She bent to pick up a stick and started swishing weeds by the roadside. I’d never seen her so pent up. She looked like she’d rather be hitting somebody instead of goldenrod.

  She didn’t want to know what plans Joe Riddley and I had for our old age. She was worried about her own, about the very real questions that plague all of us who are aging. What if I get incapacitated and need expensive care? What if I live longer than the money holds out? Will my children take care of me? Will they be financially able to, even if they want to?

  Those shadows hover around a lot of other conversations. We eye one another wondering, How could he afford early retirement? Are they crazy, spending all that on a cruise, or do they have better investments than we do?

  I considered carefully what I ought to say. “I heard Genna suggesting that you sell your daddy’s house—”

  Edie blew her lips out in a puff of disgust. “Genna keeps forgetting that the house and grove still belong to Daddy until—” She paused, then burst out, “Oh, Mac, I don’t want to lose him! But to see him lying there day after day is almost more than I can bear.” She turned away to stare across our neighbor’s watermelon field. I moseyed on slowly to give her time to collect herself and catch up.

  When she came up alongside me, she asked abruptly, “Do you forget things a lot?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember.” That fell flat, so I admitted, “Of course I forget things, sometimes. I figure my hard drive is getting full, and wish somebody would invent a program to erase temporary files from the human brain, like they have for computers, to release some capacity. But it doesn’t bother me much. Are you still worrying about that?”

  “Some.” She took the top off a goldenrod with one neat slice.

  “Is it affecting your card playing?” I’d always wondered how she kept track of who had already played what, anyway.

  She shook her head and said in a pleased voice, as if surprised by the discovery, “No! No, it’s not. I play as well as ever. It’s just at home that I keep coming across silly little things I don’t remember doing.” She gave a snort intended for a laugh. “Maybe I can start a bridge club in the Alzheimer’s center.”

  “If that was a joke, buy a book and practice,” I told her. “But stop thinking like that. You’re only fifty. That’s young these days. You’re just under an enormous amount of strain.”

  “But what if I wind up like Grandmama? Doesn’t it terrify you to think about getting older and being unable to take care of yourself?” She kicked a pebble far down the road.

  No, but I had Joe Riddley, Ridd, Walker, and their families, all of whom would be kind to elderly ancestors. Edie had Genna, Adney, and Olive, none of whom I’d trust with my old age. What people ought to be told at twenty is, “Don’t just invest your money, invest your life. Invest yourself in an extended family or a broad community of support that will take care of you when you get old.” I didn’t know what to say to Edie, impoverished as she was.

  She may have been having some of the same thoughts, for she was quiet the rest of our stroll to the highway. Halfway back, I pointed to a stand of pines Joe Riddley had planted several years before. “That’s our old-age pension. They ought to be ready for cutting about the time we get old. My daddy used to say God made pines the same nice green as money.”

  She stopped to take a rock from her shoe. “The grove takes care of all Daddy’s expenses. We never thought it would come to that, but it pays his bills.” Finally I heard her familiar chuckle. “The nuts take care of Daddy, and my salary takes care of this nut. Alex said she told you that Wick—well, he left me in a mess, is what he did. I used to get so mad I wanted to break things, but now I find I enjoy my job.”

  I was struck by how relieved and at ease she seemed now that she had somebody to listen. People were never meant to carry their burdens alone.

  We headed home, talking about upcoming changes at the library and some ideas she had if they could get funding.

  I should have remembered, though, one of Joe Riddley’s wisest observations: People usually wait until the very end of a conversation to bring up what’s closest to their hearts. As we turned into the drive, Edie asked, out of the blue, “Do you think Valerie is getting too involved with Frank? You saw them together a couple of weeks ago.”

  “They seemed close—” I began.

  “Too close?” Edie kicked another piece of gravel up ahead. “Valerie is engaged to somebody in the Navy. Did she mention that?”

  “No, but you told me.”

  “He’s away on six-month deployment, and she talks about him less and less. Meanwhile, Frank practically lives at our place, and Olive and Genna—” She paused to take a deep breath. “They think Valerie is letting him spend the night.”

  Now we’d gotten to where the peanut butter met the bread. Edie had always lived what she believed, and she didn’t tolerat
e single people sleeping together under her roof. She and Genna had had several run-ins about that while Genna was in college.

  “I don’t believe it,” she added, a shade too fast to be convincing. “I told Valerie how I feel about that before she moved in, and I trust her. I like Frank, too, though some people find him a tad peculiar. But since she started hanging out with him, Valerie has changed.”

  “Changed how?” I was picking my way through that conversation like a cat walking on a sticky floor.

  “A lot of little things.” She trailed her stick along Ridd’s newly cut lawn. “She got her belly button pierced a couple of weeks ago. She says she’s fixing to get a butterfly tattooed on her ankle, and she’s talking about piercing her tongue.”

  I winced. “Yuck! But Walker showed up from college one weekend with his hair in a Mohawk. I guess every generation has to shock its elders before it becomes the elders.”

  Edie wasn’t interested in pop psychology. “But her tongue? The possibilities for infection are enormous!”

  “I know. But you know what bothers me most? That we grown-ups have permitted the world to get so outrageous that kids have to go to dangerous lengths to be shocking. Seems to me we should have stepped in and called a halt somewhere back there, but I’ve never figured out where or when we failed.”

  “I refuse to take the blame for pierced tongues. Besides, how can Valerie sing with something in her mouth that makes her lisp?”

  “I don’t have a clue. The only comfort I can offer is that in fifteen years all these tattooed, pierced kids with pink and blue hair will probably look—well, like Genna, or my kids.”

  “I never looked like that in my life!”

  We jumped. Neither of us had noticed Genna coming toward us. It’s hard to walk on gravel without making a sound, so she must have walked on the grass. Was she deliberately trying to hear our conversation? I gave her the benefit of the doubt and decided she’d been protecting her expensive shoes.

  She frowned at Edie, then turned to me. “Did she tell you Valerie is letting Frank stay overnight?”

  “You don’t know that!” Edie clenched her stick so hard it cracked.

  Genna stood her ground, one hand on her hip. “Adney and I both know somebody is deliberately terrorizing you. Who else could it be?”

  “Terrorizing?” I repeated blankly.

  Edie slung the pieces of her stick across the yard. “I am not terrorized, I am confused.”

  Genna spoke to me, ticking off items on her fingers. “First her car seat is back when she doesn’t remember leaving it that way. Then her door is unlocked and the cat is in when he’s supposed to stay out.”

  I nodded. “I heard about all that.”

  “Then she finds one of her blouses in the laundry hamper when she knows she ironed it the day before. It’s got a stain on the front, too.”

  Edie lifted one hand, but Genna was only to finger four. “She finds her dishwasher full of clean dishes she didn’t put there, and”—her right pointer hovered over her left thumb—“there was something about magazines. What was it?”

  Edie shrugged. “I thought I’d left a bag of magazines on the backseat of my car to take to the nursing home, but I’d left it on the back porch. This is ridiculous. I’m forgetting a few things, that’s all. I’m not forgetting to pay my bills, or go to work, or how to play cards,” she finished on a triumphant note.

  “But you’re wearing yourself out taking care of that big place, trying to oversee the harvest, going to see Granddaddy Jo, playing cards all the time, and working. You can’t do it all, Edie. You can’t!” Genna’s face was flushed and damp, and red curls stuck to her forehead. “If you’d listen to other people for once, you’d put that grove on the market and get—”

  “A nice little town house?” Edie’s face was so pink she looked more likely to die of a stroke than Alzheimer’s.

  For once, I was glad to see Olive heading our way. She must have known what Genna had come out to say, because she demanded before she reached us, “Did you mention the keys? Or the pornography?”

  Genna turned my way. “Talk some sense into her, Mac. She could be living in a lovely, safe, convenient town house if she weren’t so stubborn.” She stomped back to the house.

  Olive watched her go. “I just came out to tell you Martha said dessert is ready.” She also hurried back to the house.

  “Don’t say a word,” Edie warned, “if you plan to ‘talk sense into me.’ ” Her tone mimicked Genna’s exactly.

  “I wouldn’t have the nerve. But have all those other things happened since we last talked?”

  She nodded. Now I understood why she looked so ravaged.

  “What was that about keys?”

  Her hand trembled as she reached out to strip dead leaves from a hydrangea bush near the walk. “I found a set of keys in my purse that don’t belong to me. I cannot for the life of me figure out how they got there. I don’t leave my purse lying around.”

  I mulled that over as we climbed the front porch steps. “Is there any identification on the ring? A car dealer’s name or something like that?”

  “Nothing but a brass tag with one word engraved on it. I looked it up on the Internet . . .”

  “And?” I prodded when it began to look like that word would hang in the air for eternity and we would never get dessert.

  She gave me an embarrassed grimace. “It led to a softporn Web site. Adney thought that was hilarious. But now my e-mail is full of pornographic messages. Filthy, stupid stuff.”

  “Not to mention boring and repetitive,” I added. “I was similarly afflicted after one of our teenage helpers got access to my office computer. You can clean it up, but it will take time.”

  “Adney’s coming over Sunday afternoon to work on it.”

  Olive spoke fiercely through the screened door. “We have a bridge game at your place Sunday afternoon, in case you’ve forgotten that, too. And it’s a waste of time for Adney to clean up the thing. Valerie and Frank will just use it again to look up more porn sites.”

  “You don’t know that!” Edie’s voice was low and trembling.

  Olive gave a little snort. “You know as well as I do you wouldn’t get that much filth from visiting the home page of one Web site. So where else could it come from? Unless Henry’s getting in and using the computer when the house is empty.”

  Edie went rigid, and her voice was like ice. The last time I’d heard her speak like that was when the chair of the county commission suggested we do away with the bookmobile to rural areas. “Stay out of my business, do you hear me? All of you. I’m sick and tired of it. I can take care of myself.”

  9

  On my way to work Friday, I drove two miles out of my way to see if lightning had made an isolated strike and burned down the superstore before its grand opening at nine. The big gray box still squatted in its new parking lot, festive flags flying and balloons tugging at their tethers.

  Trying to make myself feel better, I went on the Internet and ordered a new Mama Bear. A confirmation e-mail informed me it would arrive Tuesday or Wednesday.

  Joe Riddley came in around eleven, hung his cap on its hook by the window, and reported, “I ran by and had a look at the new place. Their poinsettias are two dollars cheaper than ours, they are running a loss leader on pine straw for a dollar a bale, and they had a line at the garden center checkout register. But you know who’s running the garden department? Buck Johnson.”

  Buck used to work for us, but we’d had to let him go because he was so ignorant about the nursery business, he couldn’t remember which were annuals and which were perennials. Seeing my face lighten up a bit, Joe Riddley added, “I chatted with the store manager a little, and he said they were delighted to get Buck, but he knew we’d been sorry to lose our manager.”

  I knew why he was making me laugh. He hoped to distract my attention away from that bulging plastic bag he carried. I eyed it and got a sheepish look in reply. “I bought some socks as long as I
was there, and they had shirts and work pants at a real good price—”

  “Traitor,” I muttered.

  He dropped the bag beside his desk. “You’d come back with a bag, too, Little Bit. There’s something mighty enticing about so much merchandise under one roof. It reminds you of all sorts of things you’ve been meaning to get.”

  “I‘ve been meaning to get busy on this payroll,” I snapped. “So if you will pardon me—” Then I immediately felt bad, because it wasn’t his fault. I knew he was hurting as bad as I was. He was just a nicer person.

  He dropped a hand to my shoulder. “Don’t get your dander up, honey. We’re going to be all right. This is nothing but one more change. By the time folks get as old as we are, we’re bound to know that adapting to change is part of life. It keeps things interesting.” He gave me a little squeeze and reached for his cap. “I’m going down to the tree lot for a while. You ought to see the dried-out things they have in their parking lot. Must have been sitting in a closed truck for weeks. I didn’t see a single one being sold, and our lot has been hopping all morning.”

  Back when the boys were little, Joe Riddley had the bright idea to plant Christmas trees behind our nursery. Folks came from all around to choose and cut their own live trees, and we always threw in extra greenery. He strode out the door whistling.

  He never knew I was watching out the window when he got in his car. I saw his shoulders slump. It’s hard to lose a business. It’s harder when three generations before you have succeeded so well. But he had a point about adapting.

  Old Joe Yarbrough, Joe Riddley’s great-granddaddy, was running a small sawmill when General Sherman lit through Hope County in late 1864. Riding the wave of a sudden demand for reconstruction lumber, Old Joe built his sawmill into Yarbrough’s Lumber Company. Almost any tour of late-Victorian homes in Middle Georgia includes houses built with Yarbrough lumber. That’s what enabled Old Joe to buy a thousand acres of farmland and build the big blue house Ridd now owns.

  A few decades later, Old Joe’s oldest son noticed agriculture was making a comeback, so he branched out into Yarbrough’s Feed and Seed, selling fertilizer, pesticides, bulk seed, animal feed, and orchard trees. The family survived the Depression by selling off the lumberyard and planting a number of their acres in vegetables, which they ate, sold at reasonable prices, and gave away. That built a lot of goodwill.